Pauline’s Blog

Over the last two days I have found some amazing examples of how people are using blogs in the classroom. One of the most exciting was Al Upton’s mini legends blog mentoring programme in Australia. What a fantastic opportunity for his students to expand their horizons and create an authentic audience for their work.

I also read an article by Kevin Bushweller in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue of Teacher Magazine titled “Thou Shalt Blog”. To me it raises some interesting issues around whether you let teachers discover these technologies for themselves or dictate that they will use them. There are definitely two sides to this argument. I personally believe that teachers need to be exposed to these technologies and encouraged to use them and actively supported to do so. But at the end of the day the teachers need to have buy in. If they are not committed to using the technology, it probably won’t work.  In saying this, I believe we need to have high expectations that teachers will keep up to date and give our students access to quality learning activities. Maybe an expectation to at least give it a go, with lots of support and examples of how it could be used is the answer. It is very easy not to try, but is that not disadvantaging our kids? Good on the Goochland County, Virginia school district for requiring its teachers to maintain classroom blogs. If the teachers have been given adequate support to do this and guidelines for what to do, it should work. Their objective in bringing all teachers up to a baseline of technical proficiency is, I think, desirable if we have the interests of the students and their needs at the core of it.

I found a very good article today written by Scott Huette(2006) titled Blogs in Education. In it he has lots of good ideas for getting started with blogs in the classroom, including how they could be used and what kinds of things a teacher might put on them.

Yesterday I checked out the Government’s Priorities for Education at www.educationcounts.govt.nz/themes/government_priorities which had some useful references to priorities for education in terms of parents and family/whanau. I found it interesting that although it stated that the engagement of families, whanau and communities is a very powerful influence on childrens learning and success at school, there were no indicators to measure progress in this area! So how will we know if we are getting this bit right! I am hoping using a classroom blog will help in this area - I wonder what parents think?

I have come across a really cool book by Will Richardson  entitled “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2006). It has some great background on the technology, but is also very practical in terms of how to set up these Web 2.0 tools and what can be done with them.